heywoodu

Lilian Leijn retired over the summer, and an hour ago sister Carine Leijn has also announced her retirement. https://www.facebook.com/notes/biatleijn/17-november-2017-carine-stopt-met-biatlon-het-is-heel-heel-heel-heel-heel-mooi-g/1602058766518303/ Which means the Netherlands now only has Jarl Hengstmengel left in the entire biathlon world.

Australian team tweeting in Portuguese, it looks like the new cooperation is going well

Who's going to pay for all that? And then how are you going to make more money when you have put in more work (like invested more in years of studying, working 50-60-70 hours a week)? Because it'd be rather unfair if for example I, relativaly lazy, have the same 'universal income' as someone who works their balls off every day (no matter if that's physical labour or pulling all-nighters at the office).

That was him, yes.

News has now come in Erik Meijs has died, aged 26.

Dutchman Erik Meijs, 76th in the world, was badly hurt in a car crash in Germany today. He's in the intensive care unit of a hospital and his condition is unknown yet. http://frontpage.fok.nl/nieuws/780924/1/1/50/badmintonner-meijs-zwaargewond-in-ziekenhuis.html

And I'm devastated to hear Bruna saw Laura Dahlmeier during today's training in Sjusjoen but since she lost her phone this week (just two days after arriving in Europe, crap), she couldn't take a picture with Laura for me

I think it's the same kind of move Rösch did: being realistic in seeing that the competition in your own country is just too strong and move to another country.

Meh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Definitely, that's why the Roman and Mongol empires are ruling the world now

The Japanese and Mongol empires are of course not European and indeed, I've got doubts to count Turkey as European, just like the Soviet empire, which was also mostly in Asia. They're also forgetting some stuff like the Manchu empire that slaughtered many millions of people, Mao's China if you can call that an empire, the Timurid empire in the Middle East (another many millions of deaths) and so on. If you'd start looking at individual countries and kingdoms and rulers, things would no doubt get even worse and more brutal all around the world.

Yes, he decided to switch a long time ago and made his debut for Belgium at the summer worlds this year after not competing at all in the previous season.

Huh, that's odd that there's such a difference between those lists. I see Blashko has changed nationality, too bad.

But none are on the entry lists. https://signup.eqtiming.no/Sesongstart-Skiskyting-2017/a4468?Event=Sesongstart

Then again, the Dutch team won like 15 million gold medals in speed skating last time around, I doubt everything there happened on a good piece of meat and some broccoli

RUSADA has been working with foreign agencies (or one, I forgot the exact system they put up for that), so they could perfectly fine have tested them. A Dutch skater even went to Russia to train, I doubt Kulizhnikov has been spending 10 months outside of Russia. All in all, testing them literally zero times is just somewhat absurd, it only shows that it's really not even close to being time to reinstate RUSADA yet.

Nothing but advantages right there

At least a dozen top Russian athletes have been tested........0 times in the first ten months of October http://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/21417333/at-least-one-dozen-top-russian-winter-sports-athletes-were-not-tested-russian-anti-doping-agency-first-10-months-2017 Including someone like Kulizhnikov who was banned while being a semi-interesting junior and absolutely dominated sprinting all of a sudden after his ban. I mean, I understand RUSADA: if nobody uses doping, you don't need to test, so that's easy

Time to move away from UEFA and join AFC, which would make more sense anyway and increase their chances a lot

Well, coming from a small nation in football, I'm all for it so maybe our team can qualify

But I bet there were plenty of people saying "no, going to 32 is too much, 24 is enough."

I wonder if they said the same thing prior to 1982 (going from 16 to 24) and 1998 (going from 24 to 32)

All of a sudden you'll see countries like Panama qualify, and countries like Honduras, DR Congo or Burkina Faso get really close

It's better than 10 extra places for Europe. Plus AFC and CAF have historically been better in accepting bribes

That is far from pointless.